Brick by Boring Brick
by Queen of the Crossroads
Summary: Even though she's broken, she's still there next to him, still breathing, and that's enough for him. Tony/Ziva, Tag to 7x1 - "Truth or Consequences"


**_Brick by Boring Brick_**

**_Tag to 7x1 - Truth or Consequences_**

_Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS, and the lyrics to "Brick by Boring Brick" belong to Paramore._

* * *

Nothing really compares to that feeling he gets when he looks across the bullpen and sees her empty desk. Actually, something does compare. Only one thing compares to how he feels when he sees the solid reminder of Ziva's absence. His mind drifts back to staring at the desk after Kate's death, after feeling her hot blood splatter on his face, seeing her corpse fall at his feet with a soft and final thump.

It's really the only thing that can compare to the hollowness that has settled inside of him. Is this what he is doomed to? To lose every woman he cares about? Kate is dead, Paula's dead, Jeanne is gone, Jenny's dead, Ziva is...

He doesn't even know if she's alive. They haven't heard from her in months. They don't know what her father has her doing, where she is, if she's hurt, anything. He'd give anything to see the her again, to hear her voice. Anything.

It's been so hard to care about anything since Ziva left. There's a giant, assassin shaped hole in their team. In NCIS... in him.

This is so much worse than the last time she went to Israel. She was on orders then. It had the possibility of only being temporary, and he knew that she wanted to be here, not in her homeland. Of course, it was basically his fault when she was sent back to Israel the previous year as well.

Jenny dies on his watch, Ziva is sentenced back to her homeland.

He kills Rivkin, and he ends up driving her so far away both metaphorically and literally that he wonders if he'll ever see her again. She doesn't trust him. She doesn't feel like she has a home here, a family here.

* * *

_She lives in a fairytale, somewhere too far for us to find_

_Forgotten the taste and smell, of a world that she's left behind_

_It's all about the exposure, the lens I told her_

_The angles are all wrong now, she's ripping wings off of butterflies_

* * *

Sometimes, when he leaves, and his desecration and destruction of her body is done (For now, at the least... he will be back. He always comes back. Always.) her thoughts drift to him. What he would say. Sometimes she can almost see him standing there, cracking a moronic joke, making a movie reference that she doesn't have a hope or prayer of understanding.

One day, she doesn't know when, since all the days and nights in the merciless desert compound have blended into one miserable hell, each moment basically indiscernible from another, she swears she can see him standing there, she is positive she can hear his voice.

"Watcha doing, Zee-vah?" he asks, giving her that charming half smirk that she loves and hates at the same time.

"T-Tony?" she gasps in a cracked and hoarse voice that doesn't sound anything like it should. So many weeks of disuse have left it as more of an animal like growl. He continues to give her that annoying grin as he takes a few steps closer to her. She is in her cell, her limbs unbound for the time being, though the pain in almost every inch of her body stops her from making anything more than a small movement.

She reaches out a weak, lacerated arm to grab his hand, but as soon as their hands should have touched, he disintegrates beneath her finger tips like crumbling sand, leaving her alone once more.

* * *

_Keep your feet on the ground, when your head's in the clouds_

* * *

He privately wonders is she ever even thinks about him anymore. It's not like the two of them parted on positive terms. No matter how much he misses her, no matter how much he wishes he could see her again, he cannot bring himself to regret killing Rivkin. Ziva is right, maybe he could have shot him in the legs, or somewhere that wasn't vital, but when an Israeli killing machine is advancing on you with a sharpened piece of glass, your instincts take over.

He wonders if she hates him. She probably does.

He remembers their encounter in Tel Aviv, her flying into a rage and throwing him to the ground, shoving the cold barrel of her gun into his chest and leg.

She could've killed him. Her father wouldn't have cared, or Mossad in general. NCIS would have been furious, but Eli probably would've been able to put out the fire with Vance. Gibbs and McGee would want revenge, but would be left without any ability to do so. Ziva was family. So was he. It would be the equivalent of a sister shooting her brother, and the younger brother and father being left to pick up the pieces.

Families weren't supposed to abandon each, weren't supposed to hurt each other... to _want_ to hurt each other.

He can't help but resent Gibbs for letting her stay there. He should've forced her on that plane, shouldn't have just let her leave them.

Families aren't supposed to abandon each other.

* * *

_Well, go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole_

_To bury the castle, bury the castle_

_Go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole_

_To bury the castle, bury the castle_

* * *

Her mind wears down as the weeks progress. She assumes that it's weeks. Hell, maybe it's been months. Years. How could she possibly tell? All she knows are the span of times where she is left alone in her cell, left to dwell on her injuries, both internal and external, and the times when she hears the barred door creak open, the rough, unforgiving hands on her, pulling her back to the torture chamber.

She remembers nothing of the hours following that. She has trained herself well to drift off to a world where she is not thousands of miles away from her true home, being violated and tortured by a strange man. Sometimes she fears that if she remains in her painless world for too long, she will never come back. Her mind, her heart, will be forever lost.

When her limp, bleeding body is deposited back on her bed in her cell, she is unable to move for a long time. In all her time here, she has never cried because of her injuries, because of her captivity. The man who has done this to her does not deserve her tears.

She only cries for what she has lost, for the people she knows she will never see again. In a life devoid of any comfort, she desperately wishes that her team - her family - was here. A soft kiss on her forehead from Gibbs, a joke or lascivious remark from Tony, a bone crushing hug from Abby, a sheepish and shy smile from McGee, a rambling lecture from Ducky, an inappropriate and badly timed crack from Palmer.

Being abandoned here, left for dead, has shown her that she ran away from the only home she ever truly had. The only real family she has had since Ari died. _Since I killed him_, she corrects herself weakly.

Like Pandora's box, she holds onto hope for as long as she can, but eventually that leaves her as well. She will die here, alone. It is her fate. Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. One of these days, the rough bandages placed on her will not be enough. She will bleed to death, or Saleem will break the wrong bone, or perhaps her body will just release her tortured soul out of pity.

Some days, she hopes for that outcome.

* * *

_So one day he found her crying, coiled up on the dirty ground_

_Her prince finally came to save her, and the rest you can figure out_

_But it was a trick, and the clock struck twelve_

_Make sure to build your house brick by boring brick, or the world's gonna blow it down_

* * *

He doesn't know how to feel when he finds out that she is dead. He's not sure if he's even capable of feeling anything. It's like every emotion in his body has left the building, shut down utterly and completely. If he can pinpoint any emotion in him, it's hate. Before, he was angry. Sad. Miserable. Lonely. Now... it's just white, burning hot, vengeful fury.

His heart died with Ziva. The only thing left for him to do is find the man responsible for her death, and put him through such exquisite amounts of pain that he'll be on his knees, begging Tony to end his miserable excuse for a life.

He's pretty sure Gibbs can see the smoldering fire that's been lit in his eyes, the one that speaks of pure, unadulterated hatred.

He knows what must be done.

* * *

_Keep your feet on the ground when your head's in the clouds_

* * *

She knows she cannot remain here much longer. She realizes that the faint and misty world she has locked herself inside of to avoid her real life is starting to blend into the hellish and repetitive days that make up her existence. She doesn't remember the last time she ate, the last time she slept, the last time she used the bathroom... if she thinks hard, which is becoming more difficult by the day, she realizes she can barely remember anything of her time in Somalia.

The pain has erased Ziva David, leaving this poor empty shell in its place, the shell she can barely call a person, who's glassy eyes stare forlornly into the distance, mind locked in a past that she wishes could be the present.

She dreams (she's not sure if she can call them dreams, since they have seeped into her normal life) of her days in America. Of ridiculous conversations with Tony, trying to understand what the devil McGee was saying, trying to understand whatever order was hiding behind Gibbs' intense ice blue stare.

She's convinced that they think she is dead. Otherwise, they would come to save her, wouldn't they? Her adopted family would surely succeed where her biological one had failed. She was sure her father, Malachi, and the rest of Mossad had long forgotten her. When your life is a war zone, there is no time to grieve. You move on. She and others like her were raised to be heartless killing machines.

She had made the mistake of developing a heart, a soul. If she had been the emotionless assassin who had traveled to America nearly five years ago, she's not sure how she would feel right now. She's convinced she would hurt less, but then again, sometimes she feels as though the reminders of her days with NCIS are the only thing that keep her from permanently becoming a prisoner of her ethereal dream world.

* * *

_So go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole,_

_To bury the castle, bury the castle_

_Go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole_

_And we'll bury the castle, bury the castle_

* * *

He sits next to McGee on the flight to Somalia, staring aimlessly out the windows into the blankets of dull white and gray clouds. When he was younger, he loved flying. He was amazed by flight, by the view out the narrow, air-tight windows. However, now he associates planes with negative memories.

He remembers sitting on the plane at the airport in Tel Aviv, waiting for Ziva and Gibbs to get on the plane, which was followed by the realization that Ziva would not be coming back with them. They had been one short on the flight back to DC, and they had been one short for the past four months.

It was time to make the team whole again, or die trying. McGee thinks she's still alive. Maybe she is. It's strange how okay he is with the fact that he might die trying to find out. Because, when he thinks about it, he's not sure if he's really been alive at all since she left anyway, at least in any of the ways that mattered.

* * *

_Well, you built up a world of magic_

_Because your real life is tragic_

_Yeah, you built up a world of magic_

* * *

She literally doesn't believe it when she seems him in front of her. She's sure its one of her hallucinations. However, as she looks him over, looks at McGee, she sees the cuts, the dirt, the bruises and dust. Their clothing is torn and they both look like they haven't slept or showered in quite sometime. She never thinks of them like that. They are always unharmed when she imagines them.

And Tony tells her that he can't live without her, that there is a plan to spirit them away. She knows it will not work. She's ready to die - has been ready to die for a long time, if there's any part of her left that's still alive. She offers her life up in exchange for McGee and Tony's, because even if they're not real, they matter far more than herself.

She's still unbelieving of the whole situation when Gibbs' bullet sinks into Saleem's forehead, leaving him dead on the floor. McGee unties her, and the two of them help her stand. That's when she feels it. She feels Tony's heart beating quickly through his shirt when her hands brushes across his chest when he helps her stand. As they move out of the room, she hears his harsh, labored breathing, he smells of sweat and the desert, but she can still smell him underneath it.

She realizes with a jolt that it's real, that she really is going home, just as Gibbs says when he meets them inside the compound, in the hallway lined with the bodies of Saleem's men. It's all real.

* * *

_If it's not real, you can't hold it in your hand_

_You can't feel it in your heart, and I won't believe it_

_But if it's true, you can see it with your eyes_

_Oh, even in the dark, and that's where I want to be, yeah_

* * *

He just keeps staring at her on the ride to the airfield. She's next to him in the Hummer, Gibbs at the wheel, with McGee in the passenger seat. She barely seems to know what's going on. She keeps staring down at her hands, flexing them, eyes flicking back and forth between them and him. He doesn't try to hide the fact that he's looking at her. She's caked with dirt, and he can see wounds all over her, some half healed, some that look to be infected, some that had been haphazardly stitched up with dental floss.

Saleem treated her like a Barbie doll. Ripping off limbs just to put her back together again so he could play with her some more. He feels a burning sensation of rage in his chest, and he curls his hands into fists as he watches her. She looks like a scared animal. She doesn't really look anything like his Ziva, but when she offered up her own life to save his and McGee's, he knew that there was still some of his Ziva left in there.

They would bring her back to America, and they would put her back together, if she let them. Hell, even if she told him point blank that she never wanted to see him again, he would still stick around, because she's his fuel, she's what keeps him going, and up until he saw that burlap sack ripped off of her head, he had been running on empty. Even though she's broken, she's still there next to him, still breathing, and that's enough for him.

He doesn't know how she'll react, so he reaches towards her slowly, palm open, and takes her hand in his. At first, she flinches, but then she hesitantly laces her fingers through his.

* * *

_Go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole_

_To bury the castle, bury the castle_

_Go get your shovel, and we'll dig a deep hole_

_To bury the castle, bury the castle_

* * *

_A/N: This is my first NCIS fic, so feedback would be appreciated!_


End file.
